PSYCHOANALYSIS

The term psychoanalysis pertains to the theory, therapy, and method of inquiry created by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). The origin of psychoanalysis is often traced to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900), but some of its key elements can be found in his earlier writings, especially his Studies on Hysteria (1895), cowritten with Josef Breuer.

Freudian Theory

"Freudian theory" is not a single theory but a set of smaller ones, at least some of which are familiar to most philosophers and educated people. One of the most significant and best known of these is Freud's theory of dreams.

Freud theorized that all dreams are fulfillments of repressed infantile wishes. During sleep, these repressed wishes can enter into the dreamer's consciousness, but only in a disguised form, after the dream censor has altered their appearance. Freud calls what survives the dream censorship the "manifest content"; what exists prior to the censorship is the dream's "latent content." By having a patient free associate to a dream's manifest content, Freud hoped to determine the dream's latent content and ultimately to glean information about a patient's unconscious conflicts.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud distinguishes three areas of the human mind: consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious. Consciousness contains all that we are immediately aware of; the preconscious contains mental contents that we can easily become aware of; and the unconscious contains mental contents that cannot be brought to consciousness except through the use of psychoanalytic therapy.

The reason that unconscious ideas cannot readily be brought to consciousness, according to Freud, is that they are repressed. Repression and the unconscious are closely linked in his early writings: "Thus we obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us" (Freud 1923, p. 15). On his early theory of the dynamic unconscious, what is repressed is unconscious and what is unconscious is repressed.

On September 26, 1922, however, Freud read a short paper at the Seventh International Psycho-Analytical Congress, "Some Remarks on the Unconscious," in which he indicated dissatisfaction with his theory. In an abstract of the paper (the abstract may have been written by Freud himself), it is noted that the speaker (i.e., Freud) had retold the history of the development of the theory of the unconscious and had pointed out that it had been deemed necessary to equate the dynamic unconscious with the repressed. "It has turned out, however, that it is not practicable to regard the repressed as coinciding with the unconscious and the ego with the preconscious and conscious. The speaker discussed the two facts which show that in the ego too there is an unconscious, which behaves dynamically like the repressed unconscious.…" (author unknown, 1923, p. 367). The two facts are resistance proceeding from the ego during analysis and an unconscious sense of guilt.

This short paper and its abstract anticipated the publication of his The Ego and the Id (1923), in which Freud makes another important modification of his earlier views. Here he introduces the expression "das Es " ("the it"), which he explicitly borrows from Georg Groddeck; it has been translated by Freud's English translators as "the id." On his new theory, the structural theory, the unconscious is not equated with the repressed. All that is repressed is unconscious, but some of what is unconscious is not repressed. Some of what is in the id is repressed, but some of it is not. In addition, Freud now divides the mind into the id, ego, and superego.

The ego is held to be partly conscious and partly unconscious. It negotiates the demands of the outside world and those of the id and the superego. The id is largely unknowable, according to Freud, but we can know that it exists and know some of its properties. The id is entirely unconscious; it seeks satisfaction only of its instinctual needs, and it is the source of much psychic conflict. The superego develops out of the ego and maintains a system of ideals, values, and prohibitions.

At first, Freud tended to equate repression and defense, but in later works he classifies repression as but one type of defense. Other defense mechanisms include projection, reaction formation, sublimation, isolation, and regression. Despite his work on these other types of defenses, Freud still held that repression was the most important type of defense. In fact, he saw repression as the "cornerstone" of the whole structure of psychoanalysis.

Freud appealed to repression as the important causal determinant of parapraxes, which include memory mistakes, slips of the tongue, and neuroses, although not all neuroses. What Freud called "actual neuroses," including anxiety neuroses and neurasthenia, are caused by events in later life and are not explainable by Freudian theory. What Freudian theory does purport to explain are the "psychoneuroses," such as obsessional neurosis, hysteria, and depression. The psychoneuroses are said to arise from the repression of erotic wishes; their symptoms are "compromise formations"—they represent a solution to unconscious conflicts among the id, ego, and superego.

Another significant Freudian theory concerns sexual stages of development. Each of us, it is theorized, goes through four such stages. In the first year, the infant passes through the oral stage, during which its mouth is its primary source of pleasure. The focus then changes in the anal stage, where, during the next three years or so, the infant's interest shifts to its anus. From three to five years, the child passes through the phallic period, and its genitals are of major interest. There is then a latency period lasting until puberty, when an interest in sex reemerges.

How a child reacts to events during the various stages of sexual development can help determine its adult personality. Both Freud and his followers theorized that certain personality clusters, such as obstinacy, parsimony, and orderliness, were causally linked to specific events in one or other of the infantile stages of development.

In addition to the four stages of sexual development, Freud postulated another stage, the oedipal phase, lasting roughly from age three to five years. During this period, the male child unconsciously desires to possess his mother sexually, but because of perceived threats from his father, the child develops what Freud terms the "oedipal complex." The boy begins to fear that his father will cut off his penis and develops castration anxiety. Freud's first published discussion of castration anxiety occurs in his discussion of the case of Little Hans (1909), whose mother told him that if he continued to touch his penis, she would ask the doctor to cut it off.

Some Freudians postulate in little girls a complex analogous to the oedipal complex, the "electra complex." It was Carl Jung, however, not Freud, who introduced this concept. Freud himself doubted that the concept was useful and even that the phenomenon occurred (Freud 1931, p. 229).

Psychoanalytic Therapy and Method of Inquiry

Standard psychoanalysis, or "analysis," has certain features that distinguish it from other types of psychotherapy. The analysand, the patient, reclines on a couch, while the analyst remains out of sight. The therapy is scheduled for four or five times per week, and, in contrast to short-term psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, it typically lasts three years or more.

Some analysts distinguish three phases of an analysis: the beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning phase, the analyst has a preliminary consultation with the patient, sets the fee schedule, determines (in consultation with the patient) the days and hours of analysis, and decides whether the patient is a suitable candidate for analysis. The initial phase of the analysis can last from a week or two to several months.

In the middle phase, which can last years, the heart of the analysis take place. The patient is instructed to report childhood memories and dreams and to free-associate about their contents, saying whatever comes to mind without pause or hesitation. The main methods of inquiry used by the analyst are free association and interpretation. The analyst uses the observed data from the patient's free associations in conjunction with other observations from the therapy sessions to form preliminary interpretations, or hypotheses, about the cause of the patient's problems. These hypotheses are modified as the analysis progresses, with the analyst taking into account some very important factors that tend to emerge later in the analysis.

One of these factors is resistance. Freud explained the resistance that eventually emerges as the attempt to defend against remembering what has been repressed. Resistance can take different forms, including certain verbalizations, expressions of recalcitrant attitudes, and the unwillingness to free-associate. In his Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties (1926 [1925], p. 159), Freud refers to the patient's resistance as "the resistance of the unconscious."

The solution to the resistance problem is to let the patient "work through" the resistances:

One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses. The doctor has nothing else to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened" (1914, p.155).

Another significant factor, one of "undreamt-of importance" (Freud 1940, p. 174), is transference. In the course of the analysis, the patient comes to see the analyst as the reincarnation of some important figure in his or her past and "transfers" to the analyst the negative or positive feelings formerly directed to the figure from the past. An important part of the analysis consists of the analyst's attempt to analyze the overt manifestations of the patient's transference in order to reach a final interpretation of the patient's problems.

In the third and last phase of the analysis, the final interpretation is revealed to the patient: The repressed is made conscious. Yet no mere telling of the interpretation is likely to have any lasting therapeutic effect unless the ego has been strengthened enough to enable the patient's acceptance of the interpretation.

In Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), Freud gives two criteria for terminating the analysis: first, symptom relief, with the patient overcoming his anxieties and inhibitions; and, second, the analyst's judging that so much material has been made conscious and so much resistance conquered that there is no need to fear a repetition of the pathological processes that caused the patient's problems. These criteria are relevant to deciding in one sense, Freud says, if there is to be "the end of an analysis," but in another sense, more is required. In asking whether the analysis is at an end in this second sense, we are asking whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were to continue. "It is as though," Freud writes, "it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality," as though the analyst had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient's repressions (1937, pp. 219–220).

The above material contains the main outlines of Freud's most important theories, his method of inquiry, and his therapy, but not all of his theories are covered, and important details are necessarily omitted. For brief discussions of additional psychoanalytic concepts, see B. Moore and B. Fine (1990); for more detailed discussions of nearly all of Freud's theories, the history of the psychoanalytic movement and its development in countries around the world, and the contributions of other major figures to the development of psychoanalysis, see E. Erwin (2002).

Fissures in the Movement

In the early years of the psychoanalytic movement, two serious schisms occurred: Alfred Adler (1870–1937) broke with Freud in 1911 and, at approximately the same time, Carl Jung (1875–1961) began fighting with Freud and in 1914 resigned from the International Psycho-analytical Association. These figures disagreed with Freud about several matters, but especially about the theoretical importance placed by Freud on infantile sexuality.

After breaking with Freud, Adler went on to develop his own general psychology. One of his key ideas is that the psychologically disturbed individual suffers from extreme feelings of inferiority. One of the main goals of Adlerian therapy is to eliminate this feeling of inferiority and to put in its place a feeling of community and connectedness with others. Carl Jung also developed his own type of psychotherapy and along with it a rich and complex theoretical framework that included the postulation of the collective unconscious, his theory of archetypes, and his distinction between "extroverts" and "introverts."

One could view the theorizing of Adler and Jung as taking psychoanalysis in new directions, but their theories are so radically different from Freud's that it is doubtful that either's theory or therapy is a form of psychoanalysis at all. When Adler left—or rather was pushed out of—the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, he started his own group, "The Society for Free Psycho-Analysis," but he quickly changed the name of his theory to "Individual Psychology," a step for which, Freud said, "we are all thankful." ("There is room enough on God's earth, and anyone who can has a perfect right to potter about on it without being prevented; but it is not a desirable thing for people who have ceased to understand one another and have grown incompatible with one another to remain under the same roof." [Freud 1914, p. 52]). Jung, like Adler, also did not characterize his theory or therapy as a form of psychoanalysis; he preferred the name "analytical psychology."

Long after the departure of Adler and Jung, other cracks developed in the psychoanalytic movement, but these were much smaller. One of the first of these resulted from the work of Melanie Klein, a Budapest psychoanalyst who in 1926 moved to London, where she continued her work analyzing children. Klein saw herself as continuing Freud's work, although she did depart from his theories in certain respects, such as postulating the occurrence of oedipal conflicts in little girls and at an earlier time than specified by Freud's theory. Klein claimed to have made a series of important discoveries about infants, including their having a terrifying mental life, populated by beasts and monsters, and having cannibalistic urges causally linked to earlier contact with the mother's breast. Anna Freud, also working in London at the same time, strongly disagreed with some of Klein's theorizing and managed to win the support of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society in condemning Klein's views. The result was a bitter dispute between the "Kleinians" and London psychoanalysts who sided with Anna Freud.

A second division occurred because of the development of ego psychology, the groundwork for which was laid first by Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923) and developed further by Anna Freud in her work The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1946 [1936]). Ego psychology began to flourish within the psychoanalytic tradition with the publication of Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1958 [1939]). Hartmann and his colleagues did not see themselves as breaking with the Freudian tradition in any serious way, but they placed far more emphasis than did Freud on the role of the ego, while greatly reducing the theoretical significance of the id and superego.

Two further theoretical sharp turns occurred in the second half of the twentieth century with the development of object-relations theory and self psychology, now two of the most dominant forms of psychoanalysis.

Object-relations theory developed out of the work of British psychoanalysts, among them Melanie Klein, W. D. Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott. This theory is also associated with the work of psychoanalysts living in the United States, such as Otto Kernberg. According to traditional Freudian theory, there exists in each individual biological, instinctual urges, the mental representation of which are referred to as "drives." There are two sorts of drives: the sexual drive and the drive for self-preservation. Object-relations theorists reject Freud's biologically oriented drive theory and argue that the infant is motivated not by instinctual urges but by the need to relate to another person, such as the mother. Freud, like the object-relations theorists, also used the term object in his discussion of infants, but he was referring not to people or things external to the infant but to the child's mental representation of them.

In contrast, object-relations theorists tend to refer to things or persons in close proximity to the infant as "objects," but, somewhat confusingly, the theory also talks of "internalized objects," which clearly are not objects in the external world. One leading theorist, W. D. Fairbairn, in his Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (1952, p. 137) distinguishes between "objects" and "internalized objects" in terms of a contrast between normal and pathological psychology. In the object-relations theory, psychology becomes "the study of the relationships of the individual to his objects, whilst, in similar terms, psychopathology may be said to resolve more specifically into a study of the relationships of the ego to its internalized objects" (Fairbairn, 1952, p. 137).

In self psychology, the key theoretical concept, that of a "self object," also has a double use; it is sometimes applied to persons and at other times to their mental representations. Self psychology was developed by Heinz Kohut and his colleagues. Kohut became known for his theory of the narcissistic personality disorder, said to have a different etiology from the "transference neuroses" talked about by Freudian theory. This disorder, Kohut claimed, can be recognized partly by observing its distinct symptoms and partly by analyzing the different types of transference that develop in the course of the analysis: a mirroring, idealizing, and twinship transference. Each of these transferences reflects the failure of a parent to respond adequately to a different type of need of the infant, such as the child's need to confirm its own sense of greatness (the need for a "mirroring" response) or the need to experience others who resemble it (the need for a "twin" response). The result of these failures to respond is the narcissistic pathology, the subsequent failure of the narcissistic person to develop an intact self.

The Current Status of Psychoanalysis

Freud's theorizing has had an enormous influence on psychiatry, clinical psychology, art, cinema, literature, religion, anthropology, history, biography, sociology, and philosophy. The remnants of his theorizing survives through the work of individual psychoanalysts and the work of the psychoanalytic institutes and associations that exist in the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, Sweden, Finland, Mexico, South Africa, France, Austria, and in many other countries.

The work of the breakaway theorists, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, has been considerably less popular than Freudian theory, but their theories have nonetheless been influential and are still accepted by many. Many Adlerians belong either to the International Association for Individual Psychology or to the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology. There are also Alfred Adler institutes and schools in Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, New York, and other cities.

Many adherents of the theories of Jung belong to the International Association for Analytical Psychology. C. G. Jung institutes and societies are located in this country in New York, Seattle, Portland, Boston, Los Angeles, and other large cities, and in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and other countries.

The continued influence of various psychoanalytic theories is important, but there is also the question of truth: How much of psychoanalytic theorizing is at least approximately true? Some of the things that Adler and Jung said were rather commonsensical and not controversial or original. If we subtract these propositions, how many of their distinctive and original claims have been shown to be true? Not very many. There are few, if any, formal empirical studies of their theories. The verdict must be that their theories remain little more than interesting but unproven conjectures.

The work of the ego psychologists, the object-relations theorists, and the self psychologists has been the subject of more empirical inquiry, but there is nothing that can be said to constitute a firm body of supporting evidence for any one of these modifications of Freudian theory. This fact has led one prominent psychoanalyst to point out that the developments in ego psychology were not prompted by new data in the psychoanalytic situation but by the recognition of obvious deficiencies in Freudian theory, and that none of these three theories has remedied the epistemological and methodological difficulties associated with Freudian theory (Eagle 1993).

The sheer quantity of the empirical evidence for Freudian theory and therapy is far greater than that of its newer psychoanalytic rivals. It includes not only Freud's case studies but also the published case studies of many of his followers, data from anthropology and the "psychopathology of every day life," and more than 1,500 experimental studies. There are also Freud's arguments to consider: They are designed to show that even without the benefit of controlled studies, his theories receive powerful support from the data obtained from psychoanalytic case studies.

In evaluating the Freudian evidence, one issue concerns its subject. There is a watered-down, commonsensical version of Freud's theories and there are the original, distinctively Freudian versions articulated and modified over the years principally by Freud himself. On the watered-down version, the unconscious exists if a person has mental states that exist below the threshold of consciousness, whether or not these states can be brought to consciousness without the aid of psychoanalysis. Repression is said to occur whenever one tries to keep something painful out of consciousness, which obviously happens when one tries to forget a sad love affair or a hurtful insult. There are "Freudian slips," it is said, if people make linguistic mistakes with sexual innuendoes, regardless of what causes the errors. Defense mechanisms such as "projection," "reaction formation," and "displacement" are said to be operative so long as certain types of defensive behavior are displayed, such as attributing to others one's own faults or doing just the opposite of what one would like to do, no matter what causal mechanism explains the behaviors.

The evidence for some of the best-known hypotheses of the popularized, watered-down version of Freudian theory is quite strong but not new: the evidence for some sort of unconscious mind, intentional forgetting, slips of the tongue, and defensive behaviors was known to psychologists and philosophers of the nineteenth century, before Freud invented psychoanalysis. Recent historical research has shown that even many of Freud's seemingly distinctive ideas were anticipated, not merely in some vague way but in detail, by the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), and J. F. Herbart (1776–1844) (Zentner 2002).

If we limit the discussion to what is distinctively Freudian, scholars still disagree about what the evidence shows. Some still claim that the evidence gleaned from clinical case studies strongly supports some parts of Freudian theory, although that view is losing adherents even among Freudians, partly or largely due to the trenchant and systematic criticisms of the Freudian clinical evidence by the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum (2002). If, as Grünbaum argues, the clinical evidence has little probative value with respect to Freudian theory, that leaves mainly the Freudian experimental evidence, said by some to firmly support some central parts of the Freudian corpus (Kline 1981, Fisher and Greenberg 2002). Another review of the very same experimental evidence concludes that it provides almost no support for any distinctively Freudian hypothesis (Erwin 1996).

As regards Freud's therapeutic claims, there are uncontrolled case studies and correlational studies of long term orthodox psychoanalytic therapy, but there has never been a randomized clinical trial studying its effects. Two retrospective studies of long-term psychoanalysis have been published in recent years; some analysts argue that despite their lack of controls, they provide support for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis because of the employment of novel statistical techniques or the presence of other features that obviate the need for experimental controls. These studies and the claims on their behalf are criticized in Erwin (2002).

See also Freud, Sigmund.

Bibliography

works by freud

All references to Freud's works are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

Breuer, J., and S. Freud. Studies on Hysteria (1895). S. E. 2, 19–305.

The Interpretation of Dreams (1909). S. E. 4 and 5: 1–627.

"Analysis of a Phobia in a Five–Year–Old Boy" (1909). S. E. 10: 5–149.

"On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement" (1914). S. E. 14: 3–86.

The Ego and the Id (1923). S. E. 19: 12–63.

Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926). S. E. 20: 87–172.

"Female Sexuality" (1931). S. E. 21: 225–243.

Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937). S. E. 23: 216–253.

An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940). S. E. 23: 174.

works about freud

Freud, A. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press, 1946 [1936].

Author Unknown. Abstract. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1923, 4: 367.

Eagle, M. "The Dynamics of Theory Change in Psychoanalysis." Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds: Essays on the Philosophy of Adolf Grünbaum, edited by J. Earman, A. Janis, G. Massey, and N. Rescher. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1993.

Erwin, Edward. A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Empirical Issues in Freudian Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

Erwin, Edward. The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Fairbairn, W. D. Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London: Tavistock Publications and Routledge & Keegan Paul, 2002.

Fisher, S., and R. Greenberg. "Scientific Tests of Freud's Theories and Therapy." In The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by Edward Erwin. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Grünbaum, A. "Critique of psychoanalysis." In The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by Edward Erwin. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Grünbaum, A. The Foundation of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Hartmann, H. Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: International Universities Press, 1958 [1939].

Kline, P. Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory. London: Methuen, 1981.

Moore, B., and B. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Edward Erwin (2005)